Elizabethan Sonnet Cycles eBook

The quiet evening yet together
brings,
And each returns unto his
love at night!
O thou that art
so courteous else to all,
Why shouldst thou, Night,
abuse me only thus,
That every creature to his
kind dost call,
And yet ’tis thou dost
only sever us?
Well could I wish
it would be ever day,
If when night
comes, you bid me go away.

XXXVIII

Sitting alone, love bids me
go and write;
Reason plucks
back, commanding me to stay,
Boasting that
she doth still direct the way,
Or else love were unable to
indite.
Love growing angry, vexed
at the spleen,
And scorning reason’s
maimed argument,
Straight taxeth
reason, wanting to invent
Where she with love conversing
hath not been.
Reason reproached with this
coy disdain,
Despiteth love,
and laugheth at her folly;
And love contemning
reason’s reason wholly,
Thought it in weight too light
by many a grain.
Reason put back
doth out of sight remove,
And love alone
picks reason out of love.

XXXIX

Some, when in rhyme they of
their loves do tell,
With flames and lightnings
their exordiums paint.
Some call on heaven, some
invocate on hell,
And Fates and Furies, with
their woes acquaint.
Elizium is too
high a seat for me,
I will not come in Styx or
Phlegethon,
The thrice-three Muses but
too wanton be,
Like they that lust, I care
not, I will none.
Spiteful Erinnys
frights me with her looks,
My manhood dares not with
foul Ate mell,
I quake to look on Hecate’s
charming books,
I still fear bugbears in Apollo’s
cell.
I pass not for
Minerva, nor Astrea,
Only I call on
my divine Idea!

XL

My heart the anvil where my
thoughts do beat,
My words the hammers fashioning
my desire,
My breast the forge including
all the heat,
Love is the fuel which maintains
the fire;
My sighs the bellows
which the flame increaseth,
Filling mine ears with noise
and nightly groaning;
Toiling with pain, my labour
never ceaseth,
In grievous passions my woes
still bemoaning;
My eyes with tears
against the fire striving,
Whose scorching gleed my heart
to cinders turneth;
But with those drops the flame
again reviving,
Still more and more it to
my torment burneth,
With Sisyphus
thus do I roll the stone,
And turn the wheel
with damned Ixion.